Kevin James is best known for his roles in bad TV shows like The King Of Queens and Kevin Can Wait, as well as movies like Grown Ups, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Grown Ups 2, and Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 that are somehow worse. After spending the last two decades creating this momentous body of work, we don’t blame anyone who sees the news that James has just launched a comedy YouTube channel and chooses to just watch a friend fart and fall over instead.
Incredibly, though—and definitely because the expectations surrounding Kevin James’ brand of humor can’t get any lower—the videos he’s uploaded so far are ...not completely awful?
In the best of them, James leaves a bathroom and encounters Sons Of Anarchy’s Kim Coates, who tells him he has toilet paper stuck to his shoe. The camera then goes back and forth, revealing something else increasingly gross or strange either James or Coates has on them—a bit of mustard, a bloody nose, a zit, a knife in the back—until ending in a climactic bit of absurdity.
It’s not a truly great sketch, but somehow, in the space of just over a minute, the idea manages to be funnier than anything else James has played a part in over the past couple of decades. Though not as good, there’s also a series of videos in which James is green screened into different movies, from Star Wars and Rocky Balboa to The Notebook, as a sound guy who reacts to the dramatic scenes unfolding in front of him or desperately tries to get a sound check completed.
If he does fewer of these and more weird stuff in the vein of the “You Got Something There” clip, there’s a small, reality-bending possibility that we may soon live in a world where it’s possible to actually enjoy Kevin James’ comedy output. Or, hey, maybe it’s just the fact that even the longest of these sketches comes in at less than 2 minutes that’s working for us. When it requires so little time to watch, even the latest entry to the “Kevin James falling down” oeuvre is capable of being sorta funny.
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